Welcome to Barely Legal: The Blog; This blog is run by two recent law school grads, Russ and Mike. Back when we were still law students, this was the most popular law student run blog in the world. Now, who knows what we are or what this blog is. Nevertheless, everything on this blog is uncontroverted fact, and should be interpreted as such.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Mike v. Professor, The Final Chapter

With about a month left to go before the term ended, he opened one day by telling us about his exam. “My exam,” he said, “will consist of a list of case names and terms which we covered in the reading over the course of the semester. You will be expected to explain the facts of each case and tell me what each case stands for, or what each term means.” The class was taken aback by this unconventional exam, myself among them. I am far from being a law school apologist, but I really have no issues with the typical exam format. Essay, multiple choice, or a mix of the two designed to test a students ability to apply the law to different situations requires students to use their critical thinking skills. His exam did none of that. The purpose of reading a case is to understand the underlying law, not memorize specific fact patterns and holdings. A friend later said to me, “This exam is borderline high school.” When I questioned what he meant by borderline, he explained, “it’s almost junior high.” But this is the exam he chose to give, and the class wasn’t pleased.

Dozens of hands shot into the air, and one by one, people peppered him with questions, trying to get him to narrow down the scope of the exam, or at the very least, be more specific about what he expected. He did neither. Once all of the hands had been called on, he shouted out, “Any more questions? Anyone?” Looking around the room, his eyes locked on his favorite target. “Mr. [Mike], any questions?” he asked me, despite not having my hand raised. “Actually, I do,” I said, and he launched into his carnival barker voice. “Another question! Outstanding! Please, Mr. [Mike], what is your question?”

“I was just wondering what you are trying to accomplish with an exam format like this. It seems to me that giving a hypothetical fact scenario and having us apply what we have learned in class would be a much better way of testing our knowledge than having us spit back what we memorized about certain cases.”

The shit-eating grin which had been on his face disappeared and he tensed up. “What I am trying to accomplish is to make sure that you did the reading and paid attention in class.”

“And that is more important than understanding and being able to apply the law?”

He glared at me for a second, and moved on to the lesson plan. After class, a friend told me he has never seen a professor get more defensive than he did when I called him out. Later on in that class period, in a move even more blatant than his obvious crush on the hot girl in the front row, he called on me to explain the longest, most complicated case of the semester. To his chagrin, I had read it, and succeeded in making him look stupid for the second time that day.

For the rest of the semester, he lightened up on me. Once I had called him on his awful teaching, he was less eager to let me speak up. On the last day of class, he spent the first ten minutes trying to further justify his exam. “It couldn’t be easier,” he told us. “I’ll give you a case name, and you tell me about the case. It’s just straight memorization.” And this was the folly in his thinking. For two or three years, we, as law students, have trained ourselves not to memorize cases, but to be able to read a case consisting of a unique fact pattern, and apply the underlying law to other fact patterns. This is the essence of law school. And love it or hate it, it works. Talking to my friends who are preparing for the bar, they say that even though they haven’t take Torts in two and a half years, it comes right back to them. They remember elements and exceptions and defenses, all of which was extracted from cases they read. And this is precisely what they will be tested on. The bar exam will most assuredly not ask them to recite the facts from Palsgraf. In short, the exam he gave was an insult to his student’s intelligence, and incredibly lazy on his part.

Like 3Ls across the country, I didn’t read for the last day of class. I didn’t even bring my book. I was sitting in my usual back row seat, busying myself on the internet while the class was discussing a case. He was wandering around the room, and when he was two rows in front of me, looked at me and sneered, “Mr. [Mike], tell us about the next case.”

I looked back at him and said, “I’d love to, but I didn’t read it.” I could have left well enough alone, but you know that’s not in my nature, so I sarcastically added, “Why don’t you ask me about it next week on the exam?”

The look on his face went from a sadistic smirk to utter hatred. “But class is today,” he said through clenched jaws.

“I am aware of that, but the exam is next week, and since you want us to memorize all these cases, just ask me about it then. I'll know it when it matters.”

He said something about the exam, but I didn’t quite understand him. When I asked a friend later what he had said, he told me that he didn’t understand either, and described it as “gibberish.” A few moments later, he ended class early and walked out.

Epilogue: The exam was exactly what he promised, and was probably the biggest waste of two hours since my girlfriend dragged me to see Elizabethtown. I got a B, which is what I expected, and no doubt pissed him off, seeing as how he typically gave a handful of Ds each semester.

Throughout the semester, I enjoyed telling Russ my tales from this ridiculous class, and we enjoyed making jokes about his past as a popular oldies singer. One time Russ asked why he hated me so much. I thought about it and said, “Who knows…maybe he thought I was the one who put the bop in the bop sh-bop sh-bop, not him.”